Filming, Editing, and Posting A 60 Second Recipe Video

A 60-second video?

Short-form recipe videos are insanely popular. You’ve probably seen a few of them - quick-cut, often big on personality, and beautifully filmed. If you get it right, you can suddenly find yourself with an enormous and valuable audience.

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Sam Way (@samseats), a Feasty chef, is a good example of the trajectory that these videos can put you on. What started as a lockdown project for this amateur home cook just over a year ago has become a lucrative profession. With 9.4m followers on TikTok, he’s now a long-term ambassador of Waitrose and has launched a supper club with Wahaca founder, Tomasina Myers.

When shot well, a 60-second video can convey cooking ability, taste and personality. For a private chef, this can be the ideal marketing tool.

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So read on to learn how to get your first video filmed, edited and posted!

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How to do it

Prep

• Shoot in daylight
• Get a ringlight
• Buy a phone holder 
• Have a messy area
• Plan the key shots

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Film

• Shoot from the side
• 45 degrees from the hob
• Iphone mic is fine for the ASMR
• Film the finished dish

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Edit

• Use Inshot
• Be brutal with cutting clips
• Start with the finished dish
• Narrate with personality

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Setting up your Kitchen

1) Daytime Shooting

The lighting of videos is what separates the amazing from the average, so try to shoot in daytime; nothing compares to sunlight when filming in your kitchen.

2) Ring Light

‍Get yourself a ring light. Not everyone has a kitchen with a perfectly located sunny window. These affordable bits of kit are the solution

• Most will come with a variety of lighting settings. Stick with cooler, blue shades of light, as this will more closely mimic sunshine.

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3) Phone Holder

When it comes to filming your recipes, you must buy a phone holder

• I use a clamped-on anglepoise phone holder that can attach to more or less any surface securely while offering you a wide range of angles to capture the food.

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4) Messy Area

‍Maintaining a flow while filming is also the difference between a recipe taking 1 hour and 3. 

• I find it best to designate a messy area out of shot where I can pile up dirty bowels and empty packets. Yes, this may go against all of your natural clean-kitchen instincts, but it really helps when making a detailed recipe of many steps.

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5) Shot Planning

Finally, before recording a single lettuce leaf, have a plan in mind for how you’re shooting the recipe. 

• If you’ve got lots of prep to do, film it first, before moving to the hob. It may not be how things appear chronologically in the video, but constantly moving a phone holder is soul destroying and thus, best avoided.
• You’re trying to make a short video, so don’t needlessly film every small step of the recipe. People know how to measure out flour and melt butter; these things don’t deserve your time and effort filming them. Prioritise the processes which are crucial to the making of the dish, or satisfying visually or audibly.

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Filming the recipe

1) Angles

• Most of the time I shoot from the side; the camera is not in your way and you can get closer to your ingredients for more fiddly steps. 
• Shooting only overhead has been done to death, and can make videos seem very flat.
• Alternate shots plenty in the first few videos; the only way you can find the ones you like is by trying all of them. As long as you have the steps filmed, anything more is just taste
• Having your camera positioned at 45 degrees from your hob will avoid steam fogging up your lens.

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2) ASMR

The crunching, cracking, chopping noises that come with cooking - is very important for a video with depth. Your iphone camera will be more than sufficient to capture these noises, and does not even need to be ludicrously close to your subject-matter.

• Just make sure you don’t have music playing out loud, and try to keep your cooking environment as quiet as possible (I like to have one headphone in with a podcast going)

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3) Presentation of the finished dish

This is as important as if you were taking a photo. Make sure to film yourself plating up, as you will start your video with this shot; in essence, the sexier your finished recipe looks in the first few seconds, the greater the chance of someone watching the whole thing through.

• Don’t be afraid of getting a shot of you tucking in; contented munching is another reassuring sign for the viewer.

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Editing the footage

1) Apps

Editing should not be daunting. There are a host of apps you can get for your phone that make this process incredibly quick and simple.

•  I use Inshot, which is free and available on the app store.

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2) Keep it Short

‍The video needs to be short. The main thing to remember with editing is that people’s attention span has shrunk to the size of a pea.

• I aim for 30 seconds per video, but anywhere up to 45 is a good starting point. 

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3) Be Brutal

‍Be brutal. if you’re showing yourself cutting an onion, no peeling, just a couple of knife strokes to show technique. If any shot feels even vaguely redundant, get rid of it. Just because you’ve filmed something, doesn’t mean it needs to go into the finished video.

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4) Leave out Fancy Transitions

Save them for your holiday video, they will just make the recipe harder to follow.

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5) Start with The Finished Dish

Start the video with a shot of the finished dish. This is what viewers see first, and persuades them to see the process behind making it.

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6) Don't Forget to Narrate

Once you have finished the cold-hearted edit, don’t forget to narrate. This is highly recommended, as it allows you to communicate and guide the person trying to make your recipe.

• There are many ways to do this, as you can see from some of the example accounts below.
• Get used to the sound of your own voice: it’s never as bad as you think it is.

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Suggested equipment

Phone Holder

Ring Light

The Best Video Recipe App in The Universe

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Examples

• Editing technique - @samseats
• Voiceover - @thehealchef
• Beautiful shots - @lilygbakes
• Accessible recipes - @jonwatts88
• Personality - @elburritomonster

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I hope some of that proves useful, but if for any reason you’re still flummoxed, then please do send me an email, for questions or feedback (kit@feastyrecipes.com). If you tell me it’s because of my writing, I reserve the right to sound grumpy. Best of luck, my eyes will be firmly peeled for a slew of beautiful recipe videos.

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